The Power of "Citizen"

Dear Claudia Rankine,

I don’t know what genre Citizen falls into, but it strikes me that this fact may be part of your message: race and racism does not follow neat lines; it operates arbitrarily (yet with purpose) contradicting and overriding societal rules. So it makes sense that a book about facing racism wouldn’t follow conventional rules either. The way you articulate your ideas makes for maximum impact on the reader. We are taken through story after story, always on our toes, impressed by the sheer number of back to back to back descriptions of how black people experience being a citizen in America. Of all the striking lines in your book, one stood out to me as particularly poignant. You describe the experience of  a person having to convince their partner not to confront a person who presumably said something racist. You write: “this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.” This is a theme you discuss in other specific incidents, but this single phrase sums up the barely-containable frustration of every black person who goes through situations like this innumerable times. You can’t fight back, you can’t respond, you can’t do anything, for fear of being in danger-- because the whole system is stacked against you. I know this frustration, and I’ve read many pieces by people who’ve written about this frustration, but I’ve never read something that so cogently captured this feeling. Sometimes the most effective way to argue a point is to just lay out the evidence, and you do so in a way that shakes the reader awake. Thank you for such an incredible piece of writing.

Sincerely,
Julia Chaffers

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